"She's here." Callum's voice carries through the splintered door before the wood gives way entirely. "Found her in the old forester's cabin, half-dead, smells like—"
"I can smell what she smells like." The older warden fills the doorframe, blocking the grey morning. His eyes move over me the way you'd inspect a cracked foundation—assessing damage, calculating whether the structure is still worth transporting.
Callum hauls me to my feet by the elbow. My legs answer on a three-second delay, which is generous of them, all things considered—the heat has scraped me hollow, every joint loose, every muscle wrung out like wet cloth.
"I can walk," I say, which is technically true the way a house with no roof is technically still a house. Callum's grip does not loosen.
"Then walk faster." The older warden is already moving, and Callum steers me through the door into the wet grass—not cruel, just absolute, the kind of hold that has stopped considering whether the thing it's holding has opinions.
The forest gives way to farmland, then a wide road, then something else entirely. The trees fall back like a crowd parting for a funeral procession, and a structure rises against the grey sky—dark stone, sharp towers, walls that look less built than grown from the earth itself.
"Impressive, isn't it?" Callum says, with the particular pride of a man who lives inside the beast's mouth and has mistaken it for a home.
"That's one word for it." The gates are black iron, flanked by guards who look through me the way you look through glass. Everyone in the courtyard watches me the way you watch something being delivered—mildly curious about the contents, indifferent to the packaging.
Inside, the corridors are cold and carved with symbols I cannot read. Callum steers me through double doors into a space so vast my vision needs a full breath to adjust to the scale of it.
The throne room is built to make you feel like a footnote in someone else's story, and it is devastatingly good at its job. Vaulted ceiling, dark columns, a raised dais holding a throne carved from obsidian—angular, black, designed for a man who considers comfort a concession.
The man sitting on it is exactly what the stories promised. Commanding, coldly beautiful, the kind of presence that doesn't enter a room so much as reorganize it around himself.
My throat closes. My knees forget their entire function. I know that face—the build, the silver eyes, the quality of that stillness—and my mind throws me back to the cabin with a violence that makes the room swim.
Careful hands on my wounds. A low voice asking me to choose. The weight of him while I came apart, and the thought that follows turns my stomach inside out: that the gentleness was theater, that he sent the guards to my door himself, knowing exactly what he would find.
"So this is what House Veyr sent me." His voice fills the hall without effort—low, precise, almost bored. "Smaller than I expected."
Then I see the man standing one step behind the throne, and every organ in my body rearranges itself.
Almost identical—but the scar through his left brow is in the right place. He holds himself one pace back, shoulders drawn in, as though taking up less space has been carved so deep into his bones it has become architecture.
The scent reaches me across the distance—pine resin, cold air, something beneath both that hooks into a place behind my ribs and pulls. Not the prince. Him.
I bury that so fast it leaves claw marks going down, because Desmond Wolfblade, the prince of Obsidian Reach, is watching my face with the focus of a man who reads people's worst moments for sport.
"You are mine now," he says, and it lands not as a threat but as a receipt—something already processed, already filed. "Payment for what you have done."
"I defended a ten-year-old from a wolf that was trying to kill him." My voice comes out steadier than anything inside my body deserves. "The specifics of what I've done concern me quite a lot, actually."
Something shifts in his expression—not anger, not surprise. Interest, the dangerous kind that makes the back of my neck prickle.
"What you did is destroy something that belonged to me." He lets that settle. "You are the currency your family chose, and I have accepted payment."
"My family didn't choose me." The words are out before I can catch them, bitter and fast and true. "My family has never chosen me."
"No," Desmond agrees. The softness in his voice is worse than anything sharp would have been, and he knows it. "They didn't."
The silence that follows is surgical. He lets it sit, lets it work its way beneath my skin, and my nails bite into my palms hard enough to leave marks. I hold his gaze anyway, because it's the only thing I have left to hold.
"However, I do not have time to help you settle properly,” he continues, and the choice of word is deliberately cruel and passive-agressive. “You will be held in the cells below, and my brother Arthur will be responsible for you—personally, directly."
His eyes slide to the man beside the throne with deliberate precision. "Answerable to me if she runs again."
Arthur's expression does not change. But his hands—hanging loose at his sides a moment ago—go still in a way that is its own kind of flinch, and I catalog it the way I've learned to catalog everything about powerful people: quietly, completely, for later use.
The cell I was escorted to, is small, cold, iron-barred, and clean in the way that suggests regular use. I sit with my back against the wall and press my palms flat against stone until the shaking stops pretending it's going to stop.
Hours bleed past. The torchlight shifts from amber to deep orange, and then footsteps fill the corridor—measured, deliberate, alone. Desmond appears on the other side of the bars with his arms folded, studying me the way you study a lock you intend to pick.
"Your family gave you up inside an hour," he says, conversational as weather. "No argument, no negotiation. Isolde offered you before we finished stating our terms."
"Is this the part where I cry?" I meet his eyes and let my mouth do something that is almost a smile. "I should warn you—I've had twenty-two years of practice not giving people what they want from me."
His mouth curves—not a smile, a sharpening. "The kill in the woods was luck, raw and ugly, the kind that happens once and never again. When yours runs out, you'll have nothing—no shift, no family, no currency—just a girl who got lucky once."
Every word lands exactly where he aims it—between my ribs, in the soft place where the oldest bruises live. I don't flinch, don't breathe wrong, give him absolutely nothing, and it costs me more than anything the wolf in the woods ever did.
He watches for another long moment, then makes a sound through his nose—almost impressed—and turns away. His footsteps fade down the corridor and the cell returns to its particular, close silence.
I press my palm over the mark on my forearm, hidden beneath torn fabric. It pulses once—warm, insistent—the only thing left to me from the night someone finally showed me kindness. For the last time in my life, it seems.
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